Business Intelligence at it's best ...Helping companies visualize their past, present and future!

Web/Tech

08/15/2012

"Action and reaction, ebb and flow, trial and error, change – this is the rhythm of living. Out of our over-confidence, fear; out of our fear, clearer vision, fresh hope. And out of hope, progress." -- Bruce Barton

We all want to be part of progress. In fact, most of us want to BE progress! However, becoming the leader is not without risk. We have all experienced the one step forward, two steps backward mentality. This eventually leads us to abandon our current path in favor of shelter from uncertainty. As Aran Levasseur stated in his article, Teaching Innovation Is About More Than iPads in the Classroom, "To varying degrees we've all come through the traditional model of education that has trained us to seek certainty. Combine that with the fact that we are wired to look for negative information -- and uncertainty would definitely fit into the negative category for most of us -- and we have a compound society that is increasingly risk averse. Yet without taking risks, we can't have breakthroughs." Breakthroughs become the hope we seek in order to keep progressing.

By utilizing Instalytics, CFO Rapid Fire continues to make breakthroughs. Analyzing variances allows companies to investigate where they may have deviated from the budget, prior year, benchmarks, etc. The following provides you a static illustration of variance visualizations. Detailed analyses would be completed utilizing the drill down feature with the "live" version.

Visualizations provide a clearer vision that allows companies to make decisions which ultimately affect their bottom line and progress to the next level. Analytics are the newest (and scarcest) resource companies are taping. IDC reports the business analytics market will grow at a 9.8% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2016. The abundance of data in every aspect of business is driving a need for deeper analysis. Couple this with the increasingly mobile generation and you've got a market ripe for data visualizations available anytime, anywhere.

Remember, C.S. Lewis said, "It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad." Embrace the wave of Business Intelligence! Innovate from Within!

03/30/2012

There's a new mayor in town, and it comes in the form of the first new SimCity game in a decade! Yes, it's slated for a 2013 release (too far away!) and it will take the role of building a city to a level that you didn't think was really possible. It's no longer about making sure you have all of the needs of the people like police and libraries, but now there are POLITICS involved! Homeless people, organized crime, mass murder, EVERYTHING is encompassed in this new amazing game that will come out next year.

Of course, if it's on the blog, then there must be some sort of relation to business intelligence. It's SimCity - the entire concept of the game is business intelligence! For example, if you create a booming metropolis with a population of over 100,000 people, there will obviously be a TON of data created through your sims - what they like to do in their spare time, where they work, and what their education and subsequent income is like. By taking all of this data and combining it into complex programs, you get the essence of business intelligence: a full blown city! Of course, depending on how your sims react to your management style, you could be a huge success or a total failure. Whether you become a modern-day Napoleon or a successful politician (I won't give specific examples because there will be resistance no matter who I say) there will be reactions from the citizens of your city.

For those people who are not really familar with business intelligence, SimCity is a great way to visualize it. A bunch of data brought together to create some sort of graphical or visual representation. In this case, the visualization is a city with towering skyscrapers or a really high unemployment rate. Kinda like Gotham City, but without the Batman effect.

03/25/2012

With the Final Four now set, it appears that I will finish my worst bracket in years, thanks to my awful basketball predicting ability. It is in a situation like this that I could have utilized BI to help me out with my bracket. The sites I have linked to use some sort of scientific method to determine outcomes for the NCAA tournament.

The first is from 2011, but uses a man-made formula to determine the outcome of the tournament. As you could see from his predictions, the writer did not have the greatest bracket, but he did manage to call some great upsets (Arizona over Duke being one of them) and had a much better bracket than I did. And I have won a lot of brackets in my day. Business Intelligence can help with this very kind of bracket - and can at least keep your bracket from finishing dead last like I did this year.

The next is a creation by a statistician who used a similar model to the above formula. The one big difference is that this model uses expert picks in his formula so that popular upset picks are weighted slightly more than they would if they were purely numerical. If you follow the link to the author's predictions, you will see that there are not actual picks, but rather percentages of victories. With the final four being the only games remaining, those games will be the only ones with percentages still on the page. Hopefully, after the tournament is over, all 67 game percentages will be listed on the site. I, for one, am interested to see what percentage Lehigh had to beat Duke in the round of 64.

Despite having two different methods of scientifically determining a champion in March Madness, obviously there is no way for ANYBODY to completely predict a perfect bracket. In fact, this season all brackets were busted (not perfect) by the second day of round 1. According to ESPN, nobody in the nation had the entire first round correct - and that statement was released halfway through the first round. For an entity such as the NCAA basketball tournament, it is incredibly difficult for anybody - man or machine - to correctly predict an entire tournament's outcome. But we can still use business intelligence to look somewhat smarter than a person who arbitrarely picks a champion because of a cool nickname or fun colors (South Dakota State Jackrabbits?)

03/05/2012

Chances are, if you are reading this, you probably have at least a minimal interest in the concept of business intelligence (BI). And you probably have at least a minimal knowledge of business intelligence. So let me begin by explaining the website, www.cforapidfire.com.

CFO Rapidfire is a new, cloud based BI system that will not only gather data and information, but it will also create visualizations that make sense out of sheer numbers. What is truly great about CFO Rapidfire is the fact that it is cloud-based so you can utilize it to look at trends and relationships on any mobile device.

BI can be applied to pretty much anything in today's world. Whether it's predicting the outcome of the NCAA tournament or examining trends in presidential primary exit polls, it is a great tool for today's world.

We'll use this blog to examine many of the different ways BI and CFO Rapidfire can help different causes. Check out http://cforapidfire.com now for a look at the actual website.